The cost of interrupted work (2023)

When I'm in a flow state during complex problem solving, an interruption will cause something akin to visceral pain for me. I've learned to mask and just deal, but it kills the thread holding all the context in my brain. I wouldn't know how to measure the loss in a productivity sense, but depending on the problem it can be much more than 20m to recover...

I've been trying to articulate why switching our OSS project from using public GitHub issues to private Jira issues (behind auth that requires logging in with 2FA again every 48 hours) is bad for programmer productivity. Upper management quite literally doesn't believe me. To them, "flow state" and the visceral pain getting pulled out is it causes is completely fictional.

> is completely fictional

Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be? Code maintenance, flow state, software quality is what techies invent to slack off instead of doing their job.